Cast your mind back a few years and it would have been hard to imagine that, by the mid-’20s, one of the more fashionable sounds to reference in pop music would be that of British dance music duo Basement Jaxx (Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe).
And yet here we are. Jaxx references are scattered all over Brits Producer of the Year PinkPantheress’s 2025 mixtape, Fancy That, and their influence can be heard elsewhere, too. It’s hard to imagine that Confidence Man and Jade weren’t aware of the duo’s 2005 hit Oh My Gosh when they wrote and recorded 2025 single Gossip, for example.
Discussing PinkPantheress’s endorsement, Buxton told The Sydney Morning Herald earlier this year: “She sampled us in four tracks on her mixtape [Girl Like Me, Stars, Nice To Know You and Romeo], so that’s really nice. She’s part of the new generation, so it’s nice to get the props.”
The relationship goes deeper than that, though – PinkPantheress actually credits Basement Jaxx with helping her to hone her production skills, having spent time with them in the studio.
“They were very pivotal in my learning,” she told Mixmag last year. “I went in there to make beats and songs with them, but I ended up just seeing their creative process and style and picking their brains… I ended up sampling them. I don’t want to leak how they work, but just seeing how they reach certain sounds or develop ideas was really interesting.”
PinkPantheress might be keeping shtum, but speaking to Future Music in 2015 – following a five-year hiatus, Basement Jaxx had returned with their seventh and still most recent album, Junto, in 2014 – Simon Ratcliffe was willing to offer a little insight into the Jaxx workflow.
At the time, they’d just moved to a larger facility: "We used to work together in the studio, but now we have the luxury of having a mixing room, a writing room and a vocal/live room,” Ratcliffe explained. “All of them are sizable and have computers in, so I'd say at least half of this album we were working in completely different rooms to each other. We'd swap roles and rooms, whereas in the past we'd always be stuck in one room together, hammering over something. Felix listens to one aspect and I listen to another, and he doesn't really hear what I'm hearing and I don't really hear what he's hearing, but it gets to a certain point where we both think it's cool."
Having built up a following on the mid-’90s UK house scene, Basement Jaxx made their commercial breakthrough with 1999's debut album Remedy, which spawned singles Red Alert, Jump n’ Shout, Bingo Bango and Rendez-Vu.
Reflecting on hearing that album for the first time, PinkPantheress told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2025: “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn't felt before. And also, more than that, I felt like I was listening to something I'd never listened to before. I was like, ‘I've never heard anything like this.’”
Discussing Basement Jaxx’s origins, Ratcliffe told Future Music: "I met Felix through friends of friends; he was putting on parties around London and was really into the New York/Chicago house sound. He came to my studio with his mates and wanted to make a track, so we did a few sessions. I charged £100 a day, which Felix thought was a good deal, and we seemed to have a good understanding, so eventually it kind of filtered down to just me and Felix.”
“With Basement Jaxx, we were forever trying to sound as cool and sophisticated as the American stuff, and we didn't, but in the process we ended up creating our own sound,” Ratcliffe continued. “If you want to create something, you will, but you'll make it within the limitations you've got. Presets can be great, but if you don't have that inquisitiveness and creativity to want to try and do other things, I don't think you're ever going to achieve that much, really. There's no secret, there's no magic key; the people who want to achieve things will do it because they're born to do it."
2001’s Rooty spawned more hits – Romeo, Jus 1 Kiss, Where’s Your Head At? (a huge presence on TikTok these days, confirming Basement Jaxx’s resurgence) and Do Your Thing among them. 2003’s Kish Kash gave us another in the shape of Good Luck.
Basement Jaxx’s status as a big-time singles band was confirmed by the success of a greatest hits album in 2005 (the aforementioned Oh My Gosh was a new track here), and they cemented their position in British dance music history with a headlining slot at Glastonbury the same year, replacing Kylie Minogue after she’d been forced to pull out following a cancer diagnosis.
Two more uptempo albums followed – 2006’s Crazy Itch Radio and 2009’s Scars – and there was also the chilled-out Zephyr, another 2009 release. In 2011, Basement Jaxx turned their hand to film-scoring, on Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block.
Reflecting in 2015 on why they returned to making bangers, Ratcliffe said: “We thought the musical landscape seemed to be in our ballpark - that groovy, soulful house vibe was all cool again, jazz is not a dirty word any more, and that aesthetic has shifted in our favour."
Basement Jaxx returned to touring in 2025, and are currently playing shows in Australia. They’ll be back in the UK playing festivals over the summer, and also have a sold-out Royal Albert Hall gig in London to look forward to.
Playing the hits is one thing, of course, but writing new ones is getting ever more challenging, a fact that Ratcliffe acknowledged even a decade ago.
“We constantly try to listen to the music around us to make sure that what we're doing is relevant, which, when you've been going as long as we have, becomes a bit more difficult,” he said. “You have to keep on your toes and keep referencing; it's all about the nuances in the sound and the sonics - that's more important now than ever”
PinkPantheress, of course, is having no problem staying relevant: her remix of Stateside, alongside Zara Larsson, is currently the biggest song in the world on Spotify. This is lifted from 2025 Fancy That remix album Fancy Some More?, and who else appears on that? Basement Jaxx, of course, on a new version of Tonight.
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